The United Arab Emirates by Ulrichsen Kristian Coates;

Author:Ulrichsen, Kristian Coates;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

While, at the time of writing in mid-2016, it is too early to judge results, the resources mobilized in support of government innovation in the UAE have far exceeded those in neighboring GCC states such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and even Qatar. However, capital alone will not be sufficient to achieve the far-reaching economic shift toward a knowledge-based economy, particularly if the sharp decline in international oil prices that began in 2014 persists for a considerable length of time. A successful and sustainable transformation into a knowledge economy as a key component of economic diversification will involve an ongoing process of structural and also intangible change and will be intergenerational in nature. In the East Asian cases of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, the overhaul of economic structures that began in the early 1960s only reached fruition in the 1980s. The UAE certainly has made significant progress in creating enclaves of concentrated expertise in which research and development and sector-specific university–industry collaboration can take root and flourish. Embedding and expanding the share of these enclaves and free zones will be central to the long-term task of moving from a political economy based on a comparative advantage in hydrocarbons to a knowledge-intensive economy based on a competitive advantage in a globalized setting.190

Higher education and the high-profile attraction of international branch campuses illustrate the challenge of translating initial measures into lasting impact. Dozens of universities opened branches in the UAE in the mid-2000s and by 2009 the UAE hosted more international branch campuses (forty-one) than any other country in the world; moreover, the Dubai schooling system has more international schools (253) than any other country.191 Many of the higher education campuses were located within the Dubai Knowledge Village (DKV), an educational free trade zone established in 2003, and its larger successor entity, the Dubai International Academic City (DIAC), which was launched in 2007. Such was the concentration of private (and often foreign) higher education providers that in 2010 a study conducted by a researcher at the Dubai School of Government found that only three out of the fifty-three post-secondary educational institutions licensed to award degrees or diplomas in Dubai were part of the federal public higher education system.192 The phenomenon of branch campuses was less pronounced elsewhere in the UAE, although the opening in 2010 of NYU Abu Dhabi was a landmark move as it involved the launch of an entire research university rather than the import of a single faculty or school (as in the US university branches based in Qatar’s Education City).193

The same Dubai School of Government study referred to above suggested additionally that only a minority of the students enrolled in the international branch campuses in Dubai were actually Emirati nationals, and, moreover, that the majority of them expected to return to their home countries following completion of their studies in the UAE.194 Further, the rapid influx of foreign providers into the educational free zones (and exempt from federal regulation) led to questions regarding the academic standard and integrity of some of the new arrivals.

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